UNIVERSITY of GLASGOW

Etchings         Institutions search term: gutekunst

Piccadilly

Impression: Hunterian Art Gallery
Hunterian Art Gallery
(46893)
Number: 256
Date: 1886
Medium: etching
Size: 111 x 70 mm
Signed: butterfly at right
Inscribed: no
Set/Publication: no
No. of States: 1
Known impressions: 11
Catalogues: K.256; M.252; W.208
Impressions taken from this plate  (11)

PUBLICATION

Piccadilly was not published.

EXHIBITIONS

It was exhibited at two print dealer's shows, at Obach & Co. in London and H. Wunderlich & Co. in New York, in 1903. 8

An impression was shown by the Grolier Club in New York in 1904, and Messrs Ernest Brown & Phillips lent one to the Whistler Memorial Exhibition in London in 1905. 9

8: New York 1903 (cat. no. 256); see REFERENCES: EXHIBITIONS.

9: New York 1904a (cat. no. 216); London Mem. 1905 (cat. no. 208).

SALES & COLLECTORS

Whistler sold three impressions of Piccadilly to the London print dealers, Messrs Dowdeswell, on 27 July and 26 September 1887 at £4.4.0 each. 10 He must have overestimated the appeal of this tiny, minimalist plate, for it did not sell well, and he retained four impressions (Graphic with a link to impression #K2560103, Graphic with a link to impression #K2560106, Graphic with a link to impression #K2560107, Graphic with a link to impression #K2560111).

10: GUW #08677, #00897.

At the auction of the collection of the late Joshua Hutchinson Hutchinson (ca 1829 - d.1891) at Sotheby's on 3 March 1892 (lot 310) one impression sold for only £1.10.0 to the print dealer Edmund F. Deprez (1851-1915) of Deprez & Gutekunst. A few years later, in the summer of 1897, H. Wunderlich & Co. bought one from Whistler at a fairly low price, £3.3.0. 11

Samuel Putnam Avery (1822-1904) owned one, which was signed on the tab with a butterfly about 1887 (Graphic with a link to impression #K2560112). Charles Lang Freer (1856-1919) bought one in 1902 from Obach & Co. (Graphic with a link to impression #K2560102). Howard Mansfield (1849-1938) owned another impression, which was sold through A. A. Hahlo & Co., New York, to Harris G. Whittemore (d. ca 1937) in 1919, and was bought by the Library of Congress.

11: A/c., September 1897, GUW #07287.